Al sent out an email to all the Senior Trailblazers on Saturday to see if anyone might be interested in one last "extra" hike into the southern part of the North Cascades. South to us here in Bellingham, anyway. Another long day with two hours of driving to get there and two hours back, and the daylight hours getting shorter and shorter. Four of us decided that Sunday (instead of Monday) would give us the best possibility of decent weather, so we headed past Marblemount to Hidden Lake Peaks. This picture shows the tantalizing first views we got as we ascended into a meadow after climbing in mist, with occasional punctuations of sun. We were hopeful.
The higher we climbed, the more spectacular the views. We had crossed the meadow in the lower right to see some magnificent vistas. But the higher we got, the more the trail changed to rocky outcroppings, and then we saw it: where we were headed, a Forest Service lookout cabin on the tippy-top of a huge pile of rocks!
Taken with my telephoto lens, this pile of rocks looks impossible to climb, but we followed helpful cairns and wrestled with vertigo as we got closer and closer. Al took the next picture, and it was so incredibly dramatic and showed what we were dealing with that I asked him to send it to me.
On the right is the "trail" we followed to the cabin, and although the sky looks like it is clearing, we were at more than 6,000 feet of elevation (we were just below 7,000 at the summit) and looks can be deceiving at this altitude. And yes, that is a rather uncomfortable drop-off to the left. It was important to go slow and carefully. A look to the left of this picture and you could see Hidden Lake (my picture).
We were all finally at the lookout and had a quick lunch in the sheltered cabin. It's another one of those "first come first serve" places where the first group to arrive can spend the night, while others would need to descend somewhere else, like around the lake. Here's Al coming in the door:
Just after he came in to sit down, another hiking group of two entered to join us. One of them was a six-year-old kid (almost seven, he told me) with his father. He is quite an experienced hiker to have gotten up here, as we were all a little nervous about the descent and had pretty much reached our limit of our exertion, along with chills and thrills!
When we started back down, the clouds enveloped us and it began to snow. This made our descent even more harrowing and we hoped to be down off the rocks before it got worse, but as we climbed carefully downwards, it turned to rain. Before long we were all soaked, even with all our rain gear. After about an hour of this, the rain stopped and the sun tried to break through now and then. It never did, and just a half hour before we reached the car, I learned how HARD it can rain in the mountains. Reaching the car and getting warm again never felt so good.
Four soggy Trailblazers had covered nine miles and experienced clouds, mist, fog, rain, snow, exposure to the elements, being scared, being exhilarated, and around 3,500 feet of elevation gain and loss. That's why it was a "little bit of everything," but over our wonderful dinner in Marblemount, we decided we were glad we had missed out on sleet and hail. Okay, almost everything! In spite of it all, it was a great day, and I would go back in a minute... next year.
:-)
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